MEDIOS DE PRUEBA

3.4.1 Volunteers and Communities Support for Decision-making

In crisis response work, common users, responders and other volunteers work mainly under the advice and direction of core decision-making support groups. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is ‘part of the United Nations Secretariat responsible for bringing together humanitarian actors to ensure a coherent response to emergencies’. Either directly or indirectly, OCHA takes part in any humanitarian crisis management work. By mobilizing and coordinating effective and principled humanitarian action in partnership with national and international actors in order to alleviate human suffering in disasters and emergencies. As OCHA ensures there is a framework within which each actor can contribute to the overall response effort, one of the important efforts it makes is to work directly with digital activists and volunteers to understand the crisis well as it allows OCHA to get reports from the ground. This initiative helps OCHA advocating for the rights of people in need, promoting preparedness and prevention and facilitating sustainable solutions. This UN organ has partnered and worked with different digital humanitarian groups. To deliver OCHA’s action plan on the ground, it forms a core decision-making support team that decides on different aspects of crisis response works.

The Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) is a network-of-networks, ‘enabling a consortium of Volunteer and Technical Communities

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(V&TCs) to interface with humanitarian organizations that seek their services’. The DHN has been created specifically in order to coordinate the activities of digital humanitarian volunteers. The network brings together many of the major volunteer and technical communities to increase their visibility both amongst themselves and amongst the traditional humanitarian community. This approach of DHN has helped to define a clear activation process among the volunteer communities. Organizations like OCHA and other traditional organizations are able to submit a request and rely on the DHN to build a solution team with the relevant volunteer members within the volunteer communities. This core solution team is responsible for any decision for further course of actions in regards to a particular deployment to manage disaster response activities. As disaster responders use numerous innovative digital tools and techniques, and also other human volunteers, they could easily gather the digitally analysed information on a particular situation. Such type of analysed information helps core ‘solution team’ or ‘decision makers’ to take the final decision on further actions in disaster situations.

3.4.2 Data Analysis for Decision Support Systems

Forest fire spread predictions can successfully assess decision support systems. If those tools want to be effective, they need to run quickly enough to provide the output before the real fire evolution, with real- time constraints [68]. In simulation’s output is limited to three hours maximum and this leads to a trade-off between resolution and availability. The optimization of algorithms is the way to offer on time

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enough accurate data to expert response teams. Housing decision support systems are also starting to provide simulations for the post- disaster housing problem [66]. Real-time housing recommendation needs complex heuristics, and even then two more emerging problems are still unsolved: temporary workers involved in the recovery must be housed, which may not have been included in the simulation, and coordination between housing recommendation institutions has also to be taken into account.

Rapid mapping, i.e. “on-demand and fast provision (within hours or days) of geospatial information in support of emergency management activities immediately after an emergency event” is another data analytics valuable technique for disaster management [69]. Rapid mapping is increasingly used in crisis management and there is even an International Working Group on Satellite Emergency Mapping.

Some crowdsourced mapping initiatives like OpenStreetMap (OSM) and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap (HOT) complement national agencies. Data analytics is also used to generate information. For instance, part of the map production is based on automatic affected population estimations or potential infrastructure damages evaluation. Obviously, this is only possible when there are areas with detailed reference datasets available, otherwise ad-hoc crowdsourced mapping would be necessary. Image analytics can also start with volunteer identification of objects and places, and then use data analytics or be available for expert response teams.

Social Networks and media are not only source of data. They can also be important for becoming aware of how communicated alert messages

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are perceived by citizens. Tweets sent during the Sandy hurricane, where annotators have manually tagged the emotional content: anger, fear, positive and others. This initial work has been used to train algorithms [61]. The resulting classifications have allowed new retrieval of crisis tweets, previously unseen.

Crisis informatics is now based on crowdsourced data analytics- a combination of crowdsourcing retrieval and filtering, and decision support systems. Digital volunteers are using machines to achieve real- time data analytics. Along with providing information, volunteers also participate in collective task-solving requests. Digital humanitarian networks offer the task of data analysis to volunteer communities. In near future, more accurate digital data i.e. image, geo-location and text, collected through excellent techniques like sensors system, GPS, UAV or satellite, will definitely make tasks more effective. However, there will be more risks as we use emerging communication tools and methods for disaster response management works. The next chapter is going to be based on identifying some ethical and legal concerns in crowdsourcing crisis informatics. Some possible solutions for disaster response platforms’ management contributing to Disaster Risk Reduction are also proposed briefly.

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IV. Ethical and Legal Concerns of Crisis Management